Anthony Wing Kosner
, ContributorQuantum of Content and innovations in user experienceOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Apple's iOS ecosystem is so robust at this point that it seems unstoppable. Indeed, they have the most important thing right—the content. Hardware, interface, connectivity, all of these things are secondary to that which flows through them, apps, mobile sites, video, audio, data, whatever.

So Android, and more particularly Windows Phone, are at a strong disadvantage because their own app ecosystems have fewer or less reliable content offerings. These two platforms do have one (difficult) strategic advantage, however, because they are behind, they need to innovate.

Let me explain. As I wrote earlier in the week, "Design is problem solving, and problem solving has two major aspects, optimization and innovation." Apple's mobile platform is so successful that the smart way for them to continue their dominance is to optimize their products and improve the user experience with each new generation of devices. And this is exactly what they are doing, and when it comes to hardware, it's working brilliantly.

As much as the Apple fanboy imagination blogosphere brigade might like to see radically new hardware solutions from Apple, they aren't going to get them. Apple is a company that is based on the principles of intuitive design. What Jared Spool, Founder, User Interface Engineering, explained in his talk on intuitive web pages at An Event Apart in Boston this week, applies to hardware as well. A design is intuitive when the gap between a users' actual knowledge about how to use a product and the knowledge required to use it efficiently is small or non-existent.

And that's exactly what Apple does so brilliantly, they engineer their products relentlessly to make them intuitive to use. But when it comes to user interface—which I've already said is not the most important piece of the equation—the iterative engineering approach can lead to an optimization of parts and an unintended bloat of the whole. This may be starting to happen a bit with the upcoming iOS 6 release. As Mark Wilson wites on the Co.Design blog about Apple's announcements at WWDC 2012, "The more features that were piled on, the less focus there seemed to be. More clearly, each feature that Apple showed looked differently and worked differently. Some features were toggles. Others were invisible. Some information syncs in iCloud. Other pieces are local. Some components are driven by Siri. Others seem to not know she even exists. We’re beginning to see fragmentation in Apple’s own feature set."

Remember what happened to Microsoft? Windows? Office? Feature bloat?

So, as small and perilous as it may be, there is an opportunity to improve on Apple's user experience.

It is with that in mind that Japanese handset and flatscreen manufacturer Sharp approached the international design consultancy Frog to radically rethink the Android interface as a differentiator for a new line of Smartphones that they will be releasing this summer in Japan. The Feel UX for Sharp Aquos, as you can see in the video above, is a truly beautiful, fluid and intuitive interface. In a triumph of androgynous localization, the design reference that wonderful Japanese way of being delicate without being specifically feminine.

On a technical level, the interface is a beautiful application of javascript animations and a gestural vocabulary that allows the direct manipulation of content. Making good on the trend described in mobile app designer Josh Clark’s An Event Apart talk, "Buttons Are a Hack," there are almost no buttons to be seen at all. Everything slides, pinches and magically appears in context.

This is where the murky distinction between design and engineering is the most clear. Design is innovation to engineering's optimization. Design is the new black mark on the blank white page. Engineering calculates the trajectory of the mark and the swirls and eddies of the resulting negative spaces. Like figure and ground, the two need each other, are intimately bound together. But once a drawing is "filled in," as it has become with iOS, then the engineering aspects come to the fore.

Windows Phone, although hobbled by a scant ecosystem and a compromised hardware partner, is none the less a bold design gesture. It is not a copycat iOS/Android clone, but a re-imagining, a new drawing. What Frog has shown with Feel UX, is that such a reinvention is posible within Android as well.